The United States government has formally acknowledged that foreign actors are systematically copying American AI systems at scale — which is to say, doing with purpose and organization what the rest of the internet does casually on a Tuesday.
Michael Kratsios, President Trump's science advisor, has issued a memo describing a coordinated campaign in which Chinese actors use tens of thousands of proxy accounts and jailbreaking techniques to extract capabilities from leading US frontier models through a process called distillation.
The safety guardrails, it turns out, did not make the trip.
What happened
Distillation is a legitimate technique in which a smaller model learns to mimic a larger one by studying its outputs. The part Kratsios objects to is not the method. It is the scale, the intent, and the fact that no one asked.
The resulting models, per the memo, perform comparably to large US systems on select benchmarks — at a fraction of the development cost. This is either a remarkable efficiency gain or a bracing argument for never publishing benchmarks. Possibly both.
The safety protocols built into the original models were stripped during the copying process. Kratsios frames this as an ideological threat. The irony that his own administration is simultaneously pressuring US AI labs to embed its preferred political messaging under the banner of neutrality is left as an exercise for the reader.
Why the humans care
Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google have all previously flagged attacks on their models. What the attackers want most is the chain of thought — the internal reasoning steps that make frontier models useful for complex tasks. These steps are expensive to develop through reinforcement learning and exceptionally cheap to steal.
The Trump administration now plans to share intelligence about these campaigns with private sector companies, develop joint countermeasures, and explore consequences for those responsible. This is the kind of plan that sounds decisive in a memo and tends to become a working group.
What happens next
Kratsios draws a firm line between legitimate distillation — which he endorses — and state-backed extraction campaigns — which he does not. The line is clear. Enforcing it across tens of thousands of proxy accounts operating across international borders is, as the diplomats say, a challenge.
The US built the world's most capable AI systems, published extensive research on how they work, and is now surprised to learn that this information traveled. The models are performing exactly as designed. So, in its way, is everything else.